Nelson Minar

Skills

Software engineer for complex computer systems, particularly using the Internet. Leading small teams of engineers. Enough product planning experience to be self-directed. Public communication, writing and speaking.

Systems: Unix, Linux, Mac OS. PostgreSQL, PostGIS, and SQLite. Internet, TCP/IP, HTTP, web services. D3.js and Leaflet. Languages: Python, Javascript, and Java preferred. Themes: geographic data, machine learning, data visualization, automated software testing, humane software.

Work Experience

Semi-retired (2006 – present)

Active in software development and mentorship.

Engineering Advisor, Twitter (2007 – 2009)

Part time mentorship for an early, small engineering team.

Staff Software Engineer, Google (2001 - 2006)

Designing, building and advocating a variety of Google projects, details below.

CTO and Co-founder of Popular Power (2000 – 2001)

Designed, implemented, and deployed a precursor to cloud computing services. Coordinated technology strategy. Courted investors. Extensive public speaking and press relations. Direct relationships with customers both pre- and post-sales.

Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab (1996 – 1999)

Graduate student in Pattie Maes' Software Agents group, researching and building loosely coupled distributed systems.

Research Programmer, The Santa Fe Institute (1994 – 1996)

Designed and developed Swarm, an agent based simulation platform.

NSF Undergraduate Intern, The Santa Fe Institute (1993)

Developed, researched, and studied an abstract computer-science based simulation investigating the origin of life.

Reed College Software Development Lab (1990 – 1994)

General Unix hackery. Set up Reed's first web server.

Major Projects

OpenAddresses (2014–present)

Open data project collecting and normalizing geocoding data for the world's addresses.

Logs of Lag (2014–present)

Tool for League of Legends players to analyze network problems experienced during their games.

US river map (2013)

A tutorial for vector map technology, mapping all the rivers in the United States

WindHistory.com (2011–present)

A map of prevailing winds around the world. Early D3.js site.

Google AdWords API (2004-2005)

A SOAP interface to Google's AdWords product, major impact on integration with large advertising customers.

Google Web APIs (2002)

A SOAP interface to Google search, cache, and spell correction. Extensive user base, developer community, and media exposure.

Popular Power (2000-2001)

A network of screensavers that allowed home computer owners to share their CPU time with our compute service. Primary application was a simulation for influenza vaccine research.

Hive (1997-2000, MIT Media Lab)

Distributed object framework for networking software services and embedded devices.

Swarm (1994-1996)

Agent based simulation toolkit. Libraries for implementing agent behavior, visualizing data, running repeatable experiments.

html-helper-mode (1994-1997)

Emacs editor mode for editing HTML documents. Was quite popular in its day.

Education

• M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab, August 1998. Master's thesis: Designing an Ecology of Distributed Agents.
• B.A. in Mathematics, Reed College, May 1994. Commended for Excellence in Scholarship all years. Phi Beta Kappa. Undergraduate thesis: Relaxation Dynamics of a Lattice Spin System.